Sacred Harp music or shape-note singing is as old as America itself. The term sacred harp refers to the human voice. Brought to this continent by the settlers of Jamestown, this style of singing is also known as “fasola.” In Legacy of the Sacred Harp , author Chloe Webb follows the history of this musical form back four hundred years, and in the process uncovers the harrowing legacy of her Dumas family line. The journey begins in contemporary Texas with an overlooked but historically rich family heirloom, a tattered 1869 edition of The Sacred Harp songbook. Traveling across the South and sifting through undiscovered family history, Webb sets out on a personal quest to reconnect with her ancestors who composed, sang, and lived by the words of Sacred Harp music. Her research irreversibly transforms her rose-colored view of her heritage and brings endearing characters to life as the reality of the effects of slavery on Southern plantation life, the thriving tobacco industry, and the Civil War are revisited through the lens of the Dumas family. Most notably, Webb’s original research unearths the person of Ralph Freeman, freed slave and pastor of a pre-Civil War white Southern church. Wringing history from boxes of keepsakes, lively interviews, dusty archival libraries, and church records, Webb keeps Sacred Harp lyrics ringing in readers’ ears, allowing the poetry to illuminate the lessons and trials of the past. The choral shape-note music of the Sacred Harp whispers to us of the past, of the religious persecution that brought this music to our shores, and how the voices of contemporary Sacred Harp singers still ring out the unchanged lyrics across the South, the music pulling the past into our present.   Chloe Webb, thank you so much for writing this book! I got it yesterday, started it yesterday afternoon and finished it this morning. What a really great 400-year slice of American history; it reads like an exciting novel, except that it's all factual. You've really brought to life so many things that have somehow remained insistently dull in textbooks. I especially admire your determination to track down your people, no matter who, where, or what they were. Not surprisingly, it makes a tremendously rich tapestry, and you can be proud not only of the people, but also your part in sharing their stories with all of us. It's a wonderful piece of work. Judy Hauff—Sacred Harp composer -- Judy Hauff ― email to author Published On: 2010-11-09 CHLOE WEBB has been singing all her life, from kindergarten music class, to church soloist, to a short stint as a professional singer, and now in a Fort Worth church choir. An award-winning ASID designer, Webb was more at home in high-rise buildings of Dallas than in one-room country churches with no air conditioning, where she and her husband Doug now spend some of their happiest hours. Now in retirement, Chloe and Doug Webb attend every Sacred Harp singing they can fit into their calendar, traveling from coast to coast. Legacy of the Sacred Harp By Chloe Webb TCU Press Copyright © 2010 Chloe Webb All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87565-416-4 Contents Preface, Acknowledgments, Chronology, Part One. The Civil War Generations, 1. The Sacred Harp, 2. Grandma's Louisiana, 3. To Georgia—an Unclaimed Inheritance, 4. The Home Place, 1822, 5. Revelations—Settlement of the Will, 6. The Minutes, 7. The Prodigals, 8. Crash Course in Slavery, Part Two. The American Revolutionaries, 9. Aunt Izzie, 10. Dumas Tavern and Mount Gilead, 11. Unseen Epitaphs, 12. The Presiding Elder, 13. Carolina—the Spiritual Trail, 14. Rocky River, 15. Fasola and the Margent Bible, Part Three. The French Protestants, 16. The Huguenots of Saintonge, 17. The Advocate, Part Four. Early Jamestown Colonists, 18. Stranger in a Foreign Land, 19. The Sea Venture, 20. The Year 1619, 21. Homecoming, Epilogue, Appendix, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 The Sacred Harp In a dentist's waiting room, I turned through pages of the August 1987 issue of Texas Highways and a photograph caught my eye. Aged hands held a book of music with oddly shaped notes. The article's headline read, "Sacred Harp, a Tradition Lives." The unusual music looked curiously familiar and the out-of-date print of the book's title page called to mind a music book Grandma had given me. This much-used book, The Sacred Harp, had belonged to her father, and earlier, to her grandfather, whose brother, Edmund Dumas, had written a number of its songs. The passed-down book was so worn that most of the cover was missing, the pages were yellowed, and the frayed binding threads were rotten. But I could never have thrown it away. I thought perhaps I could find Grandma's copy of The Sacred Harp in a collection of sheet music and songbooks at my home. I realized with surprise that Grandma had been dead over a decade now, yet I felt her presence as near as the person in the next chair. I could hear